


Tangle

by Bisabis



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: F/M, ladrien
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-07
Updated: 2016-08-07
Packaged: 2018-08-07 04:55:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7701610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bisabis/pseuds/Bisabis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(A little blurb I wrote for a friend on Tumblr.)<br/>Adrien has been secluded all his life. One day, a masked stranger shows up at his tower. Literally.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tangle

In a world where vigilantes are considered criminals, one rises above them all. Her name is Ladybug. She dons a mask and wields a mysteriously magical yo-yo, and always seems to disappear in a crowd. 

This is a story of how she almost died. 

“Just kidding!” she sang to herself. She knew the ins and outs of the castle like the back of her hand by now. She avoided guards, dashed through the halls, and finally found her mark: the Unlucky Ring. Legend says that it holds great power, but at the price of hallucinations for the wearer. 

She stashed it in her new ladybug-themed messenger bag (provided by the lovely Tikki), as she had minutes before everything would vanish. 

“Freeze! Hold it!” Guards. 

She whipped out her yo-yo and flung it to the nearest window, and it pulled her through the stained glass. She never thought that particular window was useful, anyway. 

Her earrings blipped, signaling the end of her time under the mask. Fortunately, she is nearing town. Her accomplices are going to meet her in two hours, and she has plenty of time. 

She lands in an alley and ran into a storage room, where she transformed back into a normal girl named Marinette. She catches the tiny Tikki in her hand. 

“You have got to stop getting into these kinds of predicaments!” Tikki scolds, shaking her head. 

“It's only until I catch Hawkmoth, right?”

“There's no use indicting yourself.” Tikki was always cynical. But she had Marinette’s best interests at heart. “But what about the Richington sisters?”

“I'll turn them in later. But for now, I have to get out of town.” She eyes a sack of cotton and pulls it aside. She puts the ring on a thin but sturdy chain around her neck. No use hallucinating in a time like this. Although, the white ring would look good with—

“Marinette, is that you?” Someone calls from outside the storage room. 

“Yeah, I'm in here!” she calls back. She stuff the necklace under her collar and brushes herself off. 

“We have a customer!”

“Okay!” 

She hardly thinks about the man in purple who always comes into the shop asking for teen boy clothes. As a teen girl herself, Marinette can appreciate a teen boy, but maybe the man has a son that can't leave the house.

* * *

Adrien had always known his history. His father took him into the forest because his magical hair was important enough for his mother to be killed over it, and he's been in isolation ever since. He knows that's no excuse, but what can he do about it? He often wondered why some silly hair would cause such havoc. But then he remembers the stories his father told him. 

His only friends were his father’s art pieces. He spent the last eighteen years or so modeling for them. The portraits were his specialty, and his father hung a portrait of the woman Adrien never knew over the fireplace. He stared at it often, pretending that she was fixing his seventy-five feet mass of hair and teaching him about the world. He's pretty good at doing it himself, though. Although one of these days, he wished someone would help him do it. 

He finishes the rest of his chores before noon, and his father would be back by three. Three hours is long enough to paint a minimalist piece. His father pretty much ignored those, so he painted a cat from his picture book on the clock’s face, the only space left to paint. 

Man, is he bored.

* * *

Marinette got out of the store not one moment too soon. Guards had come around the area earlier and were interrogating everyone, driving away customers and spawning all sorts of rumors. 

She narrowly escaped through the back from her co-worker and waited until she got to the outskirts of town before transforming. 

As planned, she meets the Richington sisters in a shady shed outside of town. 

“What took you so long?” Chloe Richington asked. Her real name was Chloe Bourgeois but she changed her name when her family disowned her. She was gorgeous, and always picked on everyone. That included her partner in crime, Sabrina Richington. No one knew her last name. All Ladybug knew was that they were squatting in her dad’s old house after he moved to another town for a different reason every time Sabrina told it. 

“Where's the ring?” Sabrina asks. 

“Right here!” Ladybug says, holding up the bag of cotton. 

Chloe immediately snatches it out of her hands. “Why such a big bag?”

“It's harder to search,” the vigilante says matter-of-factly. 

The two girls squint at her. Then they shrug. Ladybug notices a couple of posters attached to the wall of the shed. Probably wanted posters. She approached out of curiosity. Then she noticed something wrong. “Oh, no!” She ripped it off the wall. “The yo-yo isn't right. It never is!” It was a very nice drawing of her face, but for some reason, it irked her that her weapon was always some weird shape. This time it was a pentagon. How hard is it to draw a circle?

“The girl on my poster looks good, though,” Chloe says, admiring the poster she shared with Sabrina. “Oh look, you're on it too, Sabrina!”

“Chloe, the guards!” Sabrina says, pointing behind them. 

“Here's the thief!” Chloe calls out, also pointing. This time to Ladybug herself. 

“Traitor!” Ladybug yells to Chloe. Before she gets the chance to rub it in Ladybug’s face, she takes off. Stupid Chloe probably sold her out for her own freedom. 

She ran into the forest, trying not to mutter curses out loud. She ran until she couldn't hear the hoof steps of an entire legion of guards. Honestly, all these men for one scrawny teenager in a mask. 

She recognizes some parts of the woods from traveling with her family, but as she strays further from the path, she loses more and more confidence in that knowledge. She comes to a dense patch of trees against a cliff and caught her breath among them, thinking that she heard hooves again. She notices a cave and goes into it. 

“This is a very long cave,” she utters. After about fifty feet, it ends and she blinks in the light. 

She finds herself in a clearing, with a conspicuous tower in the middle of it. The tower itself was too skinny to be real, and fifty feet tall. Its gray color gives her a gloomy feeling. 

“At least it's a place to hide.”

Then, the distinct sound of a door opening and closing. By instinct, she hides in some nearby bushes.

* * *

“Adrien, where are you?” Adrien’s father calls from downstairs.

He peels himself out of bed. “A good cat nap, ruined.” He stretches and says hello to his new painting. He drew the cat exactly how it was in the book, except he chose black. It was just way more mysterious that way. 

Half of his hair was already downstairs. It hadn't moved since he had gone back to his room. 

“I had these made for you,” his father says, pulling out a paper-wrapped package. Clothes. Again. Tailor made as always. Gabriel Agreste was famous in the previous kingdom they had lived in. He designed clothes for kings, and he never let Adrien forget it. His hair was always the problem, but whenever he tried to cut it, Gabriel flipped out. 

“Thanks.”

“Tomorrow is your birthday.”

“I know.”

“I thought you'd be grateful for these.”

“You get me clothes every year.”

His father sighed. 

“It's just that…” His voice faded. “Wouldn't it be nice to go out for once? Logically speaking, the people who know I exist have stopped looking.”

Gabriel have him a hard look. “These people have no lives besides looking for the purest thing to steal and to keep it for themselves.” 

Adrien nearly said something he would regret later. “Well, if I can't go out, then how about a—”

“Did you wash your hair today?” Gabriel interrupts. 

“Yes, father.”

“Let's hear it, then.”

Adrien has to sit to have his father reach his hair. The ritual continued every year. But it's the highlight of this lonely life of his. He didn't know why, but who cares?

“What do you call it when a kitten gets into trouble?” Adrien says. 

“What?”

“A cat-tastrophe,” he laughs to himself. Then, his hair starts to glow. It's no secret that it makes his father young again and gives him incredible, mind-boggling strength. But what he does with the newfound energy he has never shared with Adrien. Ever. 

After it was over, his father packed his things again. “I'll see you tomorrow, Adrien.”

“You're leaving again?”

“I ran into a problem. It'll be over by tomorrow.”

Adrien said nothing as he watched his father climb down his hair to the ground below. He disappeared into the cave at the edge of the gorge. Adrien left his hair hanging for a moment before pulling it all back up. 

“Just you and me, guys.” He receives no response, as usual. He touches up his hair before heading back upstairs. 

Just then, he hears a sound just outside his window. He hides behind a chair at the table. He watches as a stranger in red and black clothes comes in and closes the window behind her. She sighs with relief. He squints his eyes in the lamplight. Is she wearing a mask?

“Who are you?” Adrien demands in his biggest voice. He stands up, making the chair clatter.

* * *

She jumped at his voice. She freezes at the sight of him. And boy, what a sight. Her eyes go wide at his handsome face and his hair that seemed to go on forever. 

_ Wow, you're pretty _ , she thinks. 

“I get that a lot.”

Did she say that out loud?

“Yes, you did.”

She clenches her teeth. 

“You didn't answer my question. Who are you?”

She hasn't been in this situation in a long time. Everyone knew her, with a mask or without. “My name is Ladybug. I am on a mission to defeat a supervillain named Hawkmoth. I just need a place to lay low for the night. Can you help me?”

He wrinkles his eyebrows and her heart skips a beat. His green eyes are beautiful, she notes. She made sure not to say that part out loud.

* * *

So here they are, a girl on his lenai. She refused to remove her mask, even while sleeping. He still finds that odd. The only woman he had seen was his mother, but this girl was very different. She looks nothing like his mother, but she was just as pretty. 

“I'm not a heavy sleeper,” she mutters. 

He jumps back. “I'm sorry, I'm just—”

“Pass the salt, Alya, the kiwi needs to be shaved…” 

She was talking in her sleep. He sighs with relief and laughs to himself. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees that his hair is starting to glow. He stops laughing and the glow fades away. He laughs again, but it doesn't work. 

Dejected, he heads to bed. He hears her roll over in her sleep, and hears a soft clink. He turns back to see a necklace with a ring on it sitting on the floor below her. Did she drop it?

He bends down to pick it up. The chain falls off easily. He tilts his head and places it on his middle finger. As he does, a bright light flashes and briefly blinds him.

When he opens his eyes, Ladybug looks undisturbed. He lets out air he didn't realize he was holding and looks at the ring again. 

“That was weird,” he says to himself. 

“What's weird is how long this hair is,” a weird voice says. 

Adrien whirls behind him to see a tiny, deformed cat stroking his hair on the ground. 

“You must be my new wielder. I'll cut to the chase. You feed me cheese and I transform you into something miraculous, et cetera, et cetera.” 

His jaw drops. He blinks and rubs his eyes. “I'm probably tired.”

“Excuse me, but I  _ am _ real. You can ask that one when she wakes up. I can tell she also uses a miraculous.” The cat thing pointed to Ladybug. “You can call me Plagg.”

He looks back and forth between the two. He didn't understand any of that. 

“Still confused?” The thing flew up to Adrien's face. They share a tense moment. “Feed me.”

“We don't have any cheese.”

“I'll just ask  _ her _ .” Plagg floats to Ladybug’s face. He pokes her cheek, and before Adrien could stop him, he blows inside her ear. She jerks awake and screams. 

“What was that?!” She looks around and their eyes meet. She seems to calm down when she sees Adrien, but then Plagg comes between them. 

“Do you know where I can find some cheese?” Plagg asks her. 

She drops her jaw and stammers, “W-what? You're a—!”

“Kwami. Yes, you know what I am.”

She feels her neck. “The ring,” she whispers. She turns her attention back to Adrien. “You took the ring, didn't you?”

“It fell off your neck, I swear!”

She gives him a skeptical look. She finds the chain on the ground and sighs. “Well, there's no use lying anymore.”

“Would you say the cat’s out of the bag?” Adrien suggested with a small smile. He ignores the small twinge of awkward betrayal he felt after she said that. 

Ladybug blinks, then lets out a wry laugh. “Let me explain: the ring you have and the earrings I wear are ancient artifacts called ‘miraculous’ and they were meant to be used for the good of all people.” She grimaced. “However, there is someone who is using it for personal gain, and I have to stop him.”

“Personal gain?” 

“I've been collecting evidence against him for a while now, and he's the reason I'm on the run. Because of him, there's a new law writ for the kingdom that forbids and arrests all vigilantes. Including the good ones, like me.”

“That guy sounds terrible. What exactly is he doing?”

“Everything from petty theft to attempted murder. A lot of higher ranked nobility and vagrants have been found with mysterious wounds and they all claim to have been attacked by different enemies. But my source tells me that they all follow—”

“Hawkmoth?”

“Exactly. I'm thinking that if I get enough evidence they'll clear my name.”

Adrien automatically admired her quest. She straightens her vest and stands up. 

“Well, I feel better after that!” she announces. “I really need to go soon.”

He grabs her arm too suddenly. “Please take me with you!” He lets go and apologizes. “I'm sorry, it's just… I've been stuck in this tower my whole life and I'm itching to get out.”

She looks at him with sympathy, as if she understands how he feels. 

“Would it make a difference if I said tomorrow was my birthday?” he pleads, adding his infamous puppy eyes. 

She turns red and squeaks, “Excuse me! Let me discuss this.”

“O-of course.”

“Don't look!”

“Why?”

“I! Well! Just! I have a secret identity to protect!”

At that, she runs to the nearest room with a door. He goes up to it and hears harsh whispering inside. Then it stops and the door flies open, startling both him and Plagg. 

“Okay, you can come.” 

“Yes!” He punches the air. 

“One condition: you have to stay with me at all times. And when I say run, you run. When I say to stay or hide, you hide, got it?”

He nods. “Yes, ma’am.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is a first draft and I'm not even sure if I'm going to finish it.  
> (Sorry Bridie! You can yell at me later >_


End file.
